Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The image you see here is the map I'm using for my campaigns. When initially thinking about starting a campaign, I first thought that I would go the whole-hog simulationist route and try generating an entire world before selecting a part of the setting to play in. I soon realized two things:

1) Making an entire world is a painstaking process

2) I would be making lots of stuff which would never actually help with gameplay.

This second is the biggie.

Verisimilitude is awesome, as is having a coherent world history and setting. But they are secondary to having a solid play experience. Making an entire world didn't seem like it would really help with that.

I decided to try out the suggestions of some folks (unfortunately I don't remember who, else I'd totally toss them a link) and try generating from the bottom up. Just presenting the basic information which adventurers would need to know. "This is the town you're in, Sanctuary. You know of interesting things here, and here." (pointing to 2, 14, and 4) "The Baron usually stays in his warcamp, here. You don't know what some of these other symbols indicate."

This, along with the little rumors I give each character at the start of play ("You know of an ancient treasure vault almost directly northeast of Sanctuary," and so forth) give players something to look for and a reason to go out and start exploring. The geopolitics of the region are pretty much completely undeveloped - the campaign is set on the frontier, with a few renegades living north of Sanctuary, but by and large undeveloped, mostly uninhabited, wilderness. There are other nations to the south, on all sides - but they don't really matter, save as stage dressing, for now. If my players decide "hell with Sanctuary, we're moving to Vosthenca," then they'll start journeying south, and I'll have some time to put Vosthenca together.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

I'm splitting this off from my personal LiveJournal, so I'm going to post some duplicate entries here that were originally posted there. Here's the one I'm proudest of:

A successful D&D adventurer should have an outlook like that of the Stalkers inRoadside Picnic. This is what I aspire to in my games from now on.The Zone, as the Strugatskys present it, is a place of terror and wonder. There is danger at literally every step. It is a place where an individual can find everything they want - maybe. If they are both exceptionally skilled and exceptionally lucky.The bones of those who tried and failed litter the Zone. The echoes of the past, and the monstrosities of the present. There are wonders, there are unexplained mysteries, and there are horrors unimaginable. It is the Zone, full of terror and mystery, a crucible. It is not unlike The Dungeon.And so those who thrive, in either place, require the same sort of paranoia, method, discipline, and nerve that the stalkers have. Their objective - wealth in a place of grave danger, where most who venture die - is the same. There are some who would use the treasures found to benefit others, and some who would use it for lucre.Those who enter the Zone do it because, like Red and Buzzard, they don't fit into society, they are the loners, the wild ones. Or like Kirill and Arthur, because they have a cause which necessitates great risk. It's not a safe business where one does it just to make wealth. Death is nigh, and life is cheap."I understand what you've done here, Q, but I think the lesson could've been learned without the loss of 18 members of my crew.""If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid."-Q, "Q Who", ST: tNG

Saturday, July 3, 2010

One of my players recently commented that she didn't realize that the game I've been running was post-apocalyptic in nature. And to be fair, it's not readily apparent from the setup - the "apocalypse" and the disappearance of the mysterious and cruel Bieth happened a long, long time ago, and various societies have had a chance to bounce back from the rubble.

The post-apocalypse setting makes sense for several underlying D&D assumptions - where the heck are all these gold pieces and snazzy magic items coming from? who would be stupid enough to make something called an owlbear? why are all these dungeons lying around for exploration? - and so forth.

What does terming my game "post-apocalypse" mean in a practical context here? Well, its main function, now that I think about it, is as two reminders to me.

Old-school gaming should evoke a sense of danger, of living on the edge, where one mistake can result in catastrophe when you're Out There. (More on this in a later post.) The post-apocalypse note reminds me that things are always dangerous, whether the PCs are investigating a Bieth dungeon or merely travelling from point A to point B. The towns are communities where the surrounding chaos has been pushed back, but it's always encroaching.

It's a reminder to put in the weird stuff. For most gamers, "post-apocalypse" triggers a series of images, from Mad Max and Fallout to Gamma World. This is a reminder to me to put in stuff from the Gamma World side of the equation. Twisted, warped creatures which don't make any sense because they've been living for centuries in an area blasted by the magical equivalent of a nuke. (It's a lot easier to go with wacky mutations from magic than from a nuclear exchange, I think.) Legacy of the Bieth has too often felt like a standard fantasy setting, and the weird needs to kick in more often.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Randall, over at RetroRoleplaying, just made a post titled THE House Rule for Rules Heavy Games? where he mentions a house rule which some 3.5e players have adopted - that when taking an action, the player has to have the rules for the given action immediately at hand, or else they will get skipped in initiative until they can find the rule.

Randall is somewhat aghast by this, as well he should be. It seems terrible to me as well - I have a sad memory of giving a friend playing in one of my early AD&D2e games 30 seconds to find a given rule, or else I would make something up on the spot; he flipped so quickly through my copy of the PHB that he ripped a page nearly in half.

I can't say that I never have to ask a player to check the rules on something - I am not that well acquainted with the precise rules of most of the cleric/wizard spells beyond "cure light wounds" and "magic missile." But other than those and checking a monster statblock in the MM if I'm running a random encounter and didn't have time to prep generic stats, I am generally not minded to open up the book and search for the rules.

I remember in my 4e game a year ago, play stopped for 15 minutes during an encounter because everyone was frantically looking up the rules for whether Power X was able to affect Target Y in an approved fashion. I say this with all affection and respect to my 4e group (they are an awesome bunch and our DM came up with some really interesting and creative ideas) but fuck that noise. To my mind, there are a few options for a GM in such a situation who's seeking to make the game fun and flowing: either make a ruling and have it supersede the rules, or make a ruling and check the book later (the Warhammer solution).

Way I figure...if you think that the rule is really important, then in all likelihood you know it or should know it well enough to fudge it. If it's not all that important, then just make a ruling, go with whatever is coolest or most entertaining, and forge on. I suppose you can look it up if you really, really want to. But you're damn well going to do it afterwards.

In an earlier post of Randall's, he offers this distinction between old-school and new-school gaming:

Let's say there are two major styles of role playing games. From a player point-of-view, the first (and older) style says "Here is the situation. Pretend you are there as your character, what do you want to do?" This style has been superseded over the years with a style that says "Here is the situation. Based on your character's stats, abilities, skills, etc. as listed on his character sheet and your knowledge of the (often many and detailed) rules of the game, what is the best way to use the game mechanics to solve the situation?" Old school play strongly favors the first style and frowns on too much of the second. If your game tends more to the first than to the second, it's leaning "old school." If your game tends more to the second than the first, it's leaning "new school".

I don't say that this is a definitive distinction between the two styles of play, between new-school and old-school gaming. But I think that having to stop and check the rules for 15 minutes (no exaggeration on the time) is a result of the tyranny of the mechanics.

There is a quote attributed to Dave Arneson, which is something to the effect of "The real secret we can't tell DMs is that they don't need any of this," referring to the various DMGs and so forth. I credit PARANOIA with teaching me this - the flow of the game, the story, is maximized when the rules contribute to, rather than define, the setting.

Cast off your chains and be free! You have nothing to lose but your SRDs!

I'm a relatively young gamer who was introduced to D&D through the Endless Quest gamebooks that TSR put out way back in the day. While my friends and I played versions of D&D throughout elementary and middle school, my first structured, dice-rolling, gameplay began in 1999, when my parents bought me the D&D Basic Set's 19th incarnation, according to The Acaeum. Looked something like this:

Now, in retrospect, it isn't a terribly good boxed set - definitely not as compared to some of the earlier ones. Players are given pregenerated characters with no way of making their own, the adventures provided are nothing particularly compelling...but at the time, it was magic.

I soon picked up the 2nd Edition PHB and DMG...just in time for D&D 3e to get released in 2000.

D&D 3e/3.5e is generally the lingua franca game for my generation of gamers. It's only by odd circumstance that I didn't start there, and I'm rather grateful. Now, at the time I was very very righteously angry at D&D 3e - it changed everything and the game was just fine the way it was and double swords were stupid anyway. If I wanted to change to 3e, I'd have to change the entire bookshelf of old AD&D material I had managed to acquire. Who the hell played a dwarven mage or a halfling paladin?

I was also in eighth grade at the time. You're allowed to be whiny and silly in the eighth grade. Thankfully, I managed to grow out of my pique as I grew older; the release of cool d20 products (Babylon 5! The Black Company!) managed to get me to take another look at 3.5e, and I was finally able to try and engage the system on its own merits.

As I mentioned, AD&D 2e was what I started with, but through the delights of used book stores, I started to pick up some 1st edition D&D (and older) materials. They were pretty much directly compatible with 2nd Edition materials, so it made no difference to me; it was all the same game.

Around 2004, I discovered the excellent game PARANOIA. I became a moderator on the primary PARANOIA fansite, Paranoia-live, just in time for the new edition by Mongoose Publishing to come out. Between 2004 and 2008, most of my gaming focused on PARANOIA rather than any version of D&D.

Over the past few years, I've returned to AD&D and similar old-school games. I discovered that there's a very strong old-school gaming community (sometimes called the OSR, or Old-School Renaissance), and that there were some awesome ideas and concepts being bruited about.

I took some of these old-school ideas and worked them into a campaign world I started designing in the summer of 2009, called Legacy of the Bieth. (You can see the abortive Obsidian Portal website I made for the campaign here; this might get updated later.) I'm continuing to develop the campaign, as well as come up with cool and interesting ideas, here.

This is my effort at joining the strange and interesting world of old-school RPG blogging. Inspired by folks such as Chgowiz, James Maliszewski, noisms, and Trollsmyth, I'm trying to join in and add my own creative endeavors.

I plan on discussing my own homebrew RPG campaign setting, "Legacy of the Bieth," along with my thoughts on RPG play experiences, rulesets, cool new ideas, and so forth.

I have a terrible track record with updating blogs, so I'm not going to start advertising this until I know I can keep updating on a regular basis. I have a goal of at least one post a week for now; we'll see how that goes.